So there has been a tragedy at Inzozi Nziza…the ice cream machine is broken. Yesterday we just turned it on and the ice cream would not freeze! The repairman lives in South Africa and may not be able to come until Saturday. This is a huge problem because our one-year anniversary celebration is on Saturday! We are probably going to cancel it if we don’t have ice cream, but we have already started advertising! The drumming group that has a special relationship with our shop were going to perform and we were going to give our free ice cream for kids (Inzozi Nziza has a box on the counter to collect for donations for kids’ ice cream and we give out free ice cream once a month to foster a relationship with the community and work on community development).
Besides the tragedy of the broken ice cream machine, we also met our new Peace Corps Volunteer today. She is currently doing training in a village a few hours away but stopped by to see her new location. Besides being helpful around the shop, she has been sharing with me a lot of the information she has been studying in her culture and languages classes. While I am very much on the periphery of Rwandan society, she is living in a home stay and getting a very different experience from me. It is really nice to learn so much from her; it also makes me realized how short amount of time 2 months is to try and experience a new place.
Other than work at the shop, I’ve just moved into my new house. This is much less luxurious than my supervisor’s house where I spent my first weekend. I still have electricity though which is a plus (the peace corps volunteer described her current village living situation to me and made clear how spoiled and lucky I am), but Butare is a very developed city where electricity and running water (although not hot) are normal- even if we lose electricity at least once a night. I am still surprised though when I see the cows and goats roaming round on the road outside my house. They’re pretty chill though.
